No sooner did U.S. President Joe Biden persuade his G-7 partners to back a historic global minimum corporate tax last week than critics began to find fault with it—and not just the most predictable holdouts, like some multinational corporations and the tax havens they favor, such as Ireland. Biden is also taking flak from left-leaning activist groups and the progressive wing of his Democratic Party, who think he’s asking too little of the world’s plutocrats.
One of the key issues is whether Biden and other world leaders are acting too meekly by demanding a minimum global corporate tax of at least 15 percent. “It’s absurd for the G7 to claim it is ‘overhauling’ a broken global tax system by setting up a global minimum corporate tax rate that is similar to the soft rates charged by tax havens like Ireland, Switzerland and Singapore,” said Gabriela Bucher, the executive director of the global anti-poverty organization Oxfam, in a statement. “They are setting the bar so low that companies can just step over it.”
